By Massoud Seifi, Ph.D. Data Scientist

How to Estimate the Facebook Account Creation Date

Mar 5th, 2013

Facebook Graph API and
FQL don’t provide you with a simple way of getting the creation date of a Facebook account.
But if you have a valid Facebook Access Token with ‘read_stream’ permission, it is possible to estimate the Facebook account creation date
by finding the creation date of the oldest user post. According to the Facebook documentation,

each query of the stream table is limited to the previous 30 days or 50 posts, whichever is greater, however you can use time-specific fields such as created_time along with FQL operators (such as < or >) to retrieve a much greater range of posts.

Also you must have ‘read_stream’ permission:

Querying without the ‘read_stream’ permission will return only the public view of the data (i.e. data that can be see when the user is logged out).

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About Me

I am a Data Scientist with a formal background in Computer Science and Mathematics (especially Graph Theory).
I have a high curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data and a passion to find innovative solutions for complex challenges.